Video: Public Corruption Runs Deep – Mississippi Tops List of Most Corrupt States in the Nation

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STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) – From the local clerk taking a few hundred dollars from a city account to the state official pocketing millions of dollars. Government corruption is wide-spread. Mississippi has been ranked for decades as one of the most corrupt states in the nation.

We’ve seen it time and time again. Trusted government officials caught taking bribes, misappropriating funds and breaking the law.
With recent indictments of some of Mississippi’s highest government officials, tax payers are fed up and the state is fighting back.

“Government is where the money is and if you have access to it, for some people it’s too big of a temptation to resist,” says Marty Wiseman, former Executive Director of the Stennis Center Institute at Mississippi State University.

When public servants abuse their authority, it’s taxpayers who pay the costs. Christopher Epps lead the Mississippi Department of Corrections for over a decade until last week.
On Wednesday a 49-count federal indictment was handed down against Epps and Cecil McCrory, businessman and former President of the Rankin County School District Board. McCrory is accused of providing kick backs to Epps in exchange for state contracts possibly worth billions of dollars.

“In the state of Mississippi, that’s real money and we do notice. The tax payers quickly sit down and calculate that that’s money part of which they paid. So it becomes particularly egregiou,” says Wiseman.

Fortune Magazine recently ranked Mississippi as the most corrupt state in the nation based on data collected from 1976 to 2008. However, the State Auditor’s Office argues that the data is outdated. New state laws have allowed for more convictions of white collar crimes in the last three decades.

“One good point is that while we do have corruption in Mississippi, the people who are catching the corrupt public servants are also public servants themselves and we should proud of those law enforcement efforts,” says William “Brother” Rogers, the Assistant Director of Programs at the Stennis Center in Starkville.

In the last year alone, over 1 point 5 million dollars in embezzled funds have been recovered by the State Auditor’s Office.

State Auditor Stacey Pickering also announced on November 10th that Joseph Ziegler was sentenced to three years probation. Ziegler is the former Chief of Staff for Department of Marine Resources. Nine others were also sentenced in that case. Ziegler has to repay the state over $250 thousand dollars.